Ideological Representation of Women's Oppression in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

Abstract

The abuse of women is an issue that persists throughout the ages till the present time because people are still living in a world of a dominated idea which is known as man is the self and woman is the other. So the objective of this research paper is to argue this global issue using Van Dijk's Ideological Square (1998) as a framework so as to examine the ideologies that underline the use of language in The Handmaid’s Tale. It is hypothesized that the ideology of oppression is exposed in the novel throughout using the ideological strategies of positive- self presentation and negative-other presentation. Ultimately, it concludes that the novelist employs both, male and female, characters to consistently ridicule and offer negative coverage about women and to increasingly align and offer favorable comments about men to present the world of patriarchy from a different perspective.

Keywords

• Ideology
• Critical Discourse Analysis
• oppression
• Van Dijk's ideological Square
• The Handmaid's Tale